


Sing After Me

by curiouslycurious



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 06:08:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6317761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curiouslycurious/pseuds/curiouslycurious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baby Henry is a mess and way too adorable for his own good. Evil Queens are weak to his toddler demands. And there's also singing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing After Me

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a result of a late night YouTube search for a specific song from Sesame Street that I couldn't remember all of the lyrics to. I stumbled upon clips from the episode with Madeline Kahn from the 70's that I hadn't seen since I was a kid, and I got sucked in....
> 
> If you're not familiar with Madeline Kahn's appearance on Sesame Street, then you should probably watch this first prior to reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsCOTsE4atQ - The actual song starts at 1:28, but Madeline Kahn pleases me to no end so just watch from the beginning. ^^

“Echo.”

 

Regina snorts into her cup of coffee. Henry is 18 and a half months, and he's sitting in his highchair with an empty plastic cup that he's been lifting to his lips to “sip” from whenever Regina takes a sip of her morning coffee. Morning coffee that's now dribbling down her chin. She swipes at it and smiles when Henry does the same.

 

“Echo! Echo!” Henry is banging his plastic mug against his highchair now.

 

“Henry, Henry, Henry,” Regina says gently, trying not to smile. She reaches over and places her hand on top of his when his cup hits the tray for the fourth time, raising her eyebrow in warning. He gives her such a pitiful little face, looking at her from under his lashes, bottom lip jutting out in a pout, and her heart melts on the spot. “Echo, huh,” she says, and he grins and giggles and bounces in his highchair, sad face instantly gone, little head bobbing up and down in anticipation.

 

A few months ago, on a dreadful night in which Henry had decided that he much preferred screaming to sleeping, Regina had put a video of classic Sesame Street episodes on in a last ditch effort to calm her demon child of a son. Henry had promptly fallen in love with Madeline Kahn, and now, demands for “Echo” are pretty much a daily occurrence.

 

So Regina “Evil Queen” Mills leans forward, taking Henry's little hands in hers and starts singing, “Sing what I sing, sing after me,” and Henry squeals in absolute delight, kicking his feet against the highchair. “Be my echo if you can be. Sing tra la la.”

 

“Tra la la!” Henry all but screams.

 

“Mi mi mi,” Regina continues.

 

“Me me meee!”

 

“Ha ha ha!” she sings and taps his nose on every beat.

 

“HA HA HA!” Henry yells in return, all smiles.

 

“Hee hee hee.”

 

“Hee hee HEE!” Henry throws his arms in the air.

 

Regina continues the song, singing about picking peppers and going into more echos for an enthusiastic Henry who's all giggles and grins. Regina's voice is low and throaty, and she may not be the most amazing singer, but Henry eats it up, loving every minute. He loses his breath in giggles altogether when Regina sings, “Fiddle diddle dee,” running her notes up the scale in a poor, exaggerated impersonation of Madeline Kahn's operatic trilling.

 

“Be my echo.” Regina points to Henry.

 

“Be my echo!”

 

“Sing what I sing.”

 

“SING WHAT I SING!” Henry yells in staccato, toddler voice muddling the syllables something awful but adorable.

 

“Follow the leader and sing after me,” they finish together, and Henry squeals again before they've even finished the last note. Regina is swept up in his laughter, scooping him out of his highchair and squeezing him in a hug while he giggles against her neck.

 

“All right, my little echo.” She kisses the top of his head. “Let's get you dressed.”

 

Henry hums and sings for the rest of the morning. Getting dressed, getting buckled into his car seat, walking up to Regina's office – it's all followed by La La La's or Hee Hee Hee's or, in one case, a particularly loud and obnoxious Ho Ho Ho that causes Regina's secretary to break into undignified giggling despite herself, and Regina smirks at the reaction as she herds Henry through the door to her office using only her legs and feet.

 

She thinks of how dark her castle had become in the Enchanted Forest and of Black Knights and magic mirrors and how bleak her life had been. She thinks of the beginning of a curse where every day had been the same, where she was still alone despite having everything she thought she wanted. She hears Henry toddling around behind her desk singing nonsense lyrics at the top of his lungs, and she remembers how quiet her life had been prior to Henry.

 

“Momma?” he asks.

 

“Hmm,” she replies, walking over to sit on the edge of her desk, dark castles and magic mirrors fading from thought in the face of the person she loves most.

 

“Echo?”

 

Regina smiles, cups her baby boy's cheek in her hand, and starts to sing a silly song about absolutely nothing.

 

Henry grins.

 

 

**Somewhere in Florida**

 

Emma Swan is 19 years old. She's living in a shitty apartment with four other people, but she's warm and clothed, she has a decently steady job, and a bowl of ramen noodles sitting on her lap.

 

Life could be worse.

 

She's flipping channels on their tiny, shared tv, and she stops on a station that's rerunning classic episodes of Sesame Street for some sort of charity thing. Grover is sitting on Madeline Kahn's lap, Kahn teaching him about echo songs. They start to sing together, and Emma's heart clenches for a moment, for reasons she's not sure of, but she breathes through it and continues eating, ignoring the tears dripping off of her nose and into her noodles.

 

“Follow the leader and sing after me.”


End file.
